Things are winding down for the year. Here’s some newsy notes and stuff from the last few days.

§ Nice Art; Marvel is releasing 48 special Star Wars variants to celebrate 40 years of Star Wars. The cover illustrate classic scenes from A New Hope. Above is by Mike Mayhew. Nice!

§ Calista Brill and Nilah Magruder have signed up to create Creaky Acres, a middle-grade graphic novel. It’s a three book deal! Brill is an editor at First Second (as you know from her epic two part interview here.) and Magruder won the McDuffie Diversity Award for her webcomic MFK.

The book features a cast of characters at a run-down horse barn, including new girl Nora, who has to adjust to the change from fancy suburb to poor rural community, and from being one of the few black girls riding horses in her area to being the only black kid in the whole town. The first book will publish in spring 2019.

NICE.

§ Rachel Gluckstern, formerly of DC Comics, has joined Scholastic as production editor for hardcover.

§ Kodansha Comics just released an Attack on Titan app, designed by Madefire, and you can still get three free comics – including the full Volume 1 – if you download it and sign up today ONLY. You also get some other free stuff including the anthology sampler.

Features include:
• full catalog of all chapters and volumes of the manga, including every spinoff series
• latest manga chapters available as they come out from Japan
• free Motion Books viewable only on the app
• news feeds, including exclusive interviews and video about the Attack on Titan property, with breaking announcements leading up to the Season 2 of the anime
• bundle packs for new fans to get caught up quick

“This app celebrates Attack on Titan as a global phenomenon,” said Alvin Lu, General Manager of Kodansha Advanced Media. “Hajime Isayama’s original vision is now a world unto itself, and the Attack on Titan manga app takes you right into the heart of it—you get caught up with the latest developments at once. And the news and feature feeds provide behind-the-scenes access to the creation of the manga and anime like no place else.”

“As Attack on Titan makes its long awaited comeback in 2017,” said Ben Wolstenholme, CEO and Co-Founder of Madefire, “we’re extremely proud to partner with Kodansha Comics—one of the top manga publishers in the world—and bring their hit franchise to the Motion Book Publisher platform. It’s exciting to be a part of their digital-first strategy with the multimedia iOS app and cutting edge Motion Books, and bring this seminal work to a new generation.”

§ The Attack on Titan anime is getting a second season on Netflix, starting in April. By then a series about horrific giant zombies will seem like a pleasant alternative.

§ Within hours of a Blade Runner 2049 trailer being released, a trailer for the new Twin Peaks was also released. Blade Runner and Twin Peaks are two of the things that should survive even nuclear winter and they are both coming back. The Twin Peaks trailer consists of creator David Lynch eating a donut and that is good.

§ Movie news: Sakaar, the planet from Planet Hulk, will appear in Thor: Ragnarok, because Marvel is really smart like that. People have been begging for Planet Hulk – the Hulk oes barbarian on a distant planet – t get into the MCU for awhile now and it would be a nice spinoff.

Heidi MacDonald is the founder and editor in chief of The Beat. In the past, she worked for Disney, DC Comics, Fox and Publishers Weekly. She can be heard regularly on the More To Come Podcast. She likes coffee, cats and noble struggle.